Doing the Math on Reward Pool Abuse
40 SP = $0.01
About how much Steem Power does it take to raise your vote $0.01? Originally I was thinking about 40 SP. I've been looking around at other people's votes and tracking my own and this number seems about right. I just found @pathforger give a 100% upvote for $0.13 and he has 516 SP. 516/13 = 39.69, so pretty much exactly 40 SP for a 1 cent upvote.
Why does this matter? Well, how long would it take @pathforger (person I found randomly) to double his money? Let's assume he only upvotes himself and no one else upvotes him. He can do ten 100% upvotes a day. That's $1.30 a day. Now lets convert everything to USD. I'll just use the current values.
1 SBD = 5.64 USD
1 Steem = 4.47 USD
@pathforger's 516 SP is worth 516 * 4.47 = $2306.52
@pathforger's daily 10 votes are worth 1.30 * (5.64 + 1) / 2 = $4.32
The math here might look weird because payouts are half USD half SBD.
$2306.52 / $4.32 = 534 days
What just happened?
This math shows that anyone can double their money in less than two years. This doesn't even count the compound interest one could gain by reinvesting all rewards back into Steem Power. How is this possible? The Steem blockchain only has 10% inflation and only 3/4 of that goes into the reward pool. What does this mean?
Either my math is grossly incorrect or a huge majority of Voting Power is just sitting at 100% never getting used. If all the Steem Power on this blockchain was being used everyone's votes would be worth at least five times less than they are now.
This revelation is both a good and a bad thing. On one hand we know that a vast majority of Steem Power is not being abused because it isn't being used at all. On the other hand because all of our votes are worth potentially five times more than they should be it means that reward pool abusers are five times more powerful.
Wouldn't it be nice if all that unused Steem Power was allocated in the right places and drowned out all the rewards pool abusers by a huge factor? Alas, Steem hasn't come far enough yet to implement such a grandiose plan. Maybe one day.
Okay I found a recent post in regards to all of this...
https://steemit.com/abuse/@public-eye/is-haejin-rewarded-too-much-on-steemit
I don't know if the so-called voluntarily implemented and abused "no-whale voting" experiment is going on, I've been away for a long time, but if all the whales vote a lot, everyone's vote is worth much less. So maybe that's still partially in place...
Some whales agreed to let the regular users vote up content to have more influence, and some whales ignored it and voted up their friends while flagging others they didn't like (like me). I got fed up of the abuse of power, started in January 2017 on me, I was a top earner, the top earner for a few weeks, and was not liked for my level of information quality trying to educate people... people got really jealous that I worked and earned my up to the top earning position, and so began my downfall after I started calling out the whale abuse. Flagged for a post on consciousness getting on trending page because "it's not helping attract more users to steemit, not good for steemit" and other BS reasons to flag me after. They can whale upvote their friends, but I wasn't allowed to get whale upvotes, was hypocrisy... Many just wanted fluff quantity to attract the mindless masses...
Yeah the flagging system is a joke. I've suggested trials by jury but it would require a lot of witness support to go into effect.
I have read About this few months back.
Whales screwing all the minnows from making profit. I read something about haejin. There was like a flag war going on. Many comments against haejin from what I remember. I just came across a recent post about this issue. It is a very serious problem for most of the platforms continuing success. And most Steemians out there for sure.
But In Reference to this post I agree with your calculations. My SP is only at 349.00, and my upvote is worth around 0.13 or 0.14 at full power.
how? I have more SP and I have less upvote power?
I should be more specific, this was when steem was at almost $10 and sbd was damn near $15. Honestly I think my sp was lower tho, around $270 or so.. I can go in my history to get exact numbers if you like.
That would require everyone to always use their account every day and that just wont happen unfortunately :(
Ah yes but a lot of the unused SP are huge accounts that pre-mined steem back in the day. If we start delegating SP to trusted active members they could flag all the trash on the site.
Easier said than done. Money corrupts most people. It's hard to find people like Nicholas Angel from Hot Fuzz but that's who we need. We need enforcers that will follow the rules no matter what.